Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that Israeli airstrikes shattered the supposed ceasefire in Gaza on Tuesday, dropping heaving munitions on inhabited apartment buildings and killing entire extended families who lived in them, with a death toll of at least 420, and over 500 wounded. Many bodies were still under the rubble and uncounted.
The Palestinian Minister of Health in Gaza said that among the corpses were 175 children, 89 women, and 32 elderly. Some 6 Hamas leaders were killed, so the Israeli government appears to have murdered from the skies some 84 innocent civilians for every senior target. International law and US and NATO military doctrine require the minimization of noncombatant deaths and woundings in military operations. For this reason, NATO has not permitted joint military exercises with the Israeli forces for the past year and a half.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) writes, “According to initial reports, among the areas and facilities hit are At Tabeen Governmental School in Ad Daraj area of Gaza city, Az Zawayda area in Deir al Balah, a site for internally displaced persons (IDP) in Al Mawasi area, in western Khan Younis, and IDP tents in Tal as Sultan area, in western Rafah.”
The 540 wounded are out of luck, since Israel has deliberately and wantonly destroyed most hospitals in Gaza and none is fully functional. There are some field hospitals set up by aid organizations but Israel has blockaded medical supplies for the past two weeks.
Although the killing of hundreds of innocent civilians is egregious, it should be remembered that the Israeli government has also cut off Gaza from food, medicine and other essential supplies. (OCHA) reports that:
- “Over one million people risk being left without food parcels in March, if supplies are not allowed into Gaza, compared with more than two million people reached during the first 42 days of the ceasefire, the Food Security Sector warns.”
That is, Israel is on the cusp of half-starving a million persons. Half the population in Gaza consists of children. If this kind of deliberate infliction of malnutrition on a population made up so extensively of minors were perpetrated by any other government in the world, the US State Department would be jumping up and down blue in the face denouncing it as war criminals.
OCHA continues, “Between 10 and 20 per cent of 4,500 surveyed pregnant and breastfeeding women are malnourished, a recent analysis by the Nutrition Cluster reveals.”
Malnourished embryos can suffer permanent cognitive damage. American evangelicals and Catholics who are so upset about abortion as killing a human being would have to be similarly exercised about permanently blighting an embryo if they were going to be consistent.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ordered the massacre and announced the resumption of his total war on the people of Gaza, is wanted for war crimes on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. The International Court of Justice is considering a complaint brought by South Africa against Israel for violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, and in January 2024 issued a preliminary injunction against Israel on the grounds that the charge of genocide is plausible.
Although Netanyahu gave as his pretext for the atrocity the failure of Hamas to release the remaining 25 or so living Israeli hostages and the bodies of another 25 deceased ones, it seems obvious that cutting off all food and supplies to Gaza and then bombing it to smithereens is more likely to kill the remaining hostages than to free them. Most hostages were released in phase 1 of the ceasefire negotiated by the Biden team shortly before leaving office and then by Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff. Netanyahu refused to enter into Phase 2 of the process, however, at the end of February. Although he blames Hamas, there is no reason to believe its leadership was not willing to implement Phase 2.
“Children,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025
In fact, Netanyahu wanted all the hostages released immediately so that he could reignite the war on Gaza civilians, to please his far, far, far right cabinet. He appears to have become convinced that no such quick release is likely, and so he just restarted his genocidal air campaign.
He has anyway been routinely bombing Gaza even during the supposed ceasefire, and has killed dozens of Palestinians every week in March.
As he committed Tuesday’s atrocity, Netanyahu was able to bring back into his cabinet Itamar Ben-Gvir, who returned as Minister of National Security after resigning over the January ceasefire. Ben-Gvir has been convicted of racist incitement and has waved around guns menacingly in public and distributed guns to mobs. As a Kahanaist he was on a US State Department terrorist watch list in the first years of this century.
Netanyahu needs the extreme-right, the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, to ensure his majority in parliament and to safeguard his government from falling in a vote of no-confidence. He is on trial for corruption and hopes to use the perquisites of office as prime minister to avoid the fate of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was prosecuted for corruption and jailed. The Israeli justice system, like the Jim Crow system of the US Deep South, is useless for protecting the rights of minorities, but it is ruthless in pursuing government officials charged with corruption.
Netanyahu rightly guesses that the Trump regime will do nothing to interfere with his resumption of the genocide.
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